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Here’s what we need. You can do it, old girl. I know you can. Okay, I won’t call you that again. Sorry Goddess…Your Earthiness. We are now, we humans, about seven billion spread all over the place. I’m sure you know this. Now I realize you have other species to consider but don’t we come first? After all, none of them can even count to seven billion.

So the deal is this. Through one device or another we may have overextended ourselves. Maybe two or three billion would have been enough. But you know how it is. ‘Green revolutions’, building a bigger customer base, religious taboos and desire for additional members, reactionary eroticism and, of course National Pride in numbers…so…seven billion demanding minions R us.

Now it may be a strain but you have got to keep working with us. I know, I know, that’s a huge imposition but you can’t let us just starve, can you? Can you? Now I worked out the numbers and tried to be on the conservative side, i.e.

Yes, most first- world and even many second- world people expect three meals a day. Okay, but…
tons of folks are third -world and are happy to get even one meal a day. So I split the difference.
Call it one and one half meals per person, per day. Why quibble? What we need from you is to keep supplying the following:

Ten and one half billion meals a day. Works out to seventy three billion meals per week. Three hundred billion a month. Thirty six hundred billion meals a year. Indefinitely. Got that? Good.

I know. Yeah, Yeah. That takes up a lot of your farmland and fisheries. I know, nobody much eats raw so lots of your precious fuel goes for cooking all those meals. And the boats, trains, trucks, mules and camels to carry the stuff about. And we keep way too many cows, sheep and pigs. But what’s the alternative?

We starve! I can’t believe you’d do that. What do you mean you’re broke…oh, broken. Humans have made such a mess with your stuff that you have to cut your losses and economize. Swell!
You’re capping your largesse at four billion meals a day!! What will I tell everybody? You don’t have a clue. That’s great. Thanks for nothing, Gaia…old spoilsport.